China is a country with the highest coal mining in the world. In order to exploit coal resources, a large number of roadways have to be excavated underground. Therefore, roadway maintenance and monitoring is especially important. During roadway tunneling, the surrounding rocks are subject to certain deformation and damage under the action of stress; however, the roadway deformation and damage is more severe during storing. If the roadway surface deformation is not monitored and controlled, crushed stones may fall from the roof sometimes or even the entire roof rock may fall, severely threatening the life safety of the underground workers.
The conventional roadway deformation monitoring method mainly involves manual measurement at specific spots. Such a method not only has high measurement errors and requires arrangement of a large number of cross sections, but also have too few of measurement spots for cross section monitoring to monitor the deformation condition at the cross sections accurately, not to mention reflecting the rule of deformation and damage of the surrounding rocks at the roadways.